Renowned cinematographer and artist Christopher Doyle celebrates Hong Kong and its people with this documentary-fiction hybrid that focuses on Hong Kong residents in their childhood, youth, and old age.

Renowned cinematographer and artist
Christopher Doyle celebrates Hong Kong
and its people with his latest film Hong
Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied
Preposterous, a semi-fictional documentary
divided into three parts that focus on Hong
Kong residents in their childhood, youth,
and old age.

In Doyle's special form of cinematic narrative,
real people improvise fictive scenes
inspired by their own stories, which we
hear in voiceover. The film's many endearing
characters are all portrayed with rare
grace: kids interrogating themselves on the
topic of world religion, young rappers and
artists giving voice to their discontent in
underground music bars, and senior citizens
going on speed-dating tours of the city.

The film's free-flowing form is much
like that of a jazz music piece in which
improvisation is as important as a carefully
studied score. Many of its images depict a
Hong Kong that has never before been
represented on film; Doyle shows the slow
side of the city, the one inhabited by people
who value ideals over finances. Of particular
note is his inclusion of the Umbrella
Movement and the recent pro-democracy
protest in Hong Kong, which blocked traffic,
arrested the city's frenzied pace, and forced
people to stop and ponder the real meaning
of freedom.

The questions raised by the Umbrella
Movement — questions about how we can
live together and what a society should be
— permeate all three sections of this collaboratively
made triptych. Hong Kong Trilogy
is an artwork in sync with the pulse of the
city, truly a film "of the people, by the people,
for the people."